"Made-It-Myself" Bale Wrapper

"Made-It-Myself" Bale Wrapper BALE HANDLING Bale Handling (31B) 27-2-34 Wanting to have better quality forage for his small dairy herd, David Geertson, Branchport, New York, went looking for a wrapper to cover his round bales with plastic. "If you can wrap the bales for balage, you don't need to wait for hay to dry before baling. It reduces the effect of weather on feed quality," he notes. But the $3,000 price tag on a commercial tractor-mounted wrapper was hard for him to justify. So Geertson decided he could make a wrapper just as good in his shop. He used parts from a junked New Holland ground-driven manure spreader and an IH no. 15 forage chopper. He made a 3-pt. frame from the old silage chopper and fitted it with a bale spear made from the rear axle of the manure spreader, leaving the drive sprocket in place. A hydraulic motor turns the spear, via a large drive chain he took off the spreader. "It takes a big roller chain to spin the bale," he notes. He added a spool to hold a 30-in. roll of plastic, and hung that on a sliding bracket on a 5-ft. length of pipe. "I made the spool and bracket out of pipe and flat steel. To keep tension on the roll as I turn the bale, I used a clamp from an old silo hoop," he says. Geertson says wrapping a bale takes only a couple of minutes after you've picked it up with the spear. "It works best with two people. One runs the hydraulics. The other fastens the end of the plastic to the bale manually and then moves the carrier with the plastic roll along the support arm to wrap the bale. We wrap about a foot along each end of the bale and then push the bales together in a line to seal them off for fermentation." Geertson figures his wrapper cost no more than $300 to make, and took about 40 hours to build. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, David Geertson, 4352 Belknap Hill Rd., Branchport, N.Y. 14418 (ph 315 595-2537).

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